Friday night and yesterday morning, I did more disassembling in my old bedroom. Slowly, slowly making progress. (I’m moved upstairs, but lots of my stuff is still downstairs.)

Yesterday evening, I picked up plumtreeblossom from the T and we both went grocery shopping. She loves coming out to the huge suburban grocery stores. We each got a huge heaping cartful. (Oh, also yesterday morning I had cleared out the fridge so there’d be any place to put any of this.) Then, after dropping our shopping loads at my house, we went out to the Finnish steam baths a few blocks away and had a lovely blast of heat in the middle of the winter. After that, we went to the Firefly’s Barbeque (gratuitous Flash/audio warning!) in Quincy for dinner, which is becoming one of our favourite dinner venues.

(I tried one of their hot sauces. plumtreeblossom asked me how it was, and I said it was tasty, but pretty mild. She had a teensy taste to see, and disagreed amusingly. To me, it seemed milder than Tabasco, although more flavourful; to her, it seemed stronger than Tabasco.)

Then we came back here, and plumtreeblossom got to stay in my new bedroom for the first time.

This morning, we loaded up the car with plumtreeblossom’s groceries, and went out to the little hole-in-the-wall diner we like to go to for a yummy breakfast. plumtreeblossom needed leaf bags, and we went a bit out of our way to a Lowe’s. (I was debating going to the Home Depot nearby, but ① I don’t like their politics or their labour practices, and ② I had this notion that there might be some stuff at the Lowe’s I wanted, too.) This turned out to be an incredible impulse-purchase success; the Lowe’s had porch swings (with canopies) on sale. They had four different kinds out, one which unfolds into a bed, and a very small one. I bought the one that unfolds into a bed for my deck, so I’m going to have comfy seating (and, when the weather gets a lot warmer, maybe occasionally sleeping) out there! It’s getting delivered in a week. plumtreeblossom had somebody measure the little two-person one so she could check whether it would fit on her balcony. When I dropped her off this afternoon we measured the balcony, and it will, so she’s getting it, and she’ll have a nice covered place to sit out there and have her morning coffee and cigarette. What delightful discoveries!

Oh, and we did find leaf bags. :-)

On the way out of the Lowe’s, I had some weird visual stuff going on in one of my eyes that it later turns out was probably connected with my first ever migraine. It looked like a curved streak in the field of vision of my left eye had kaleidoscope-like flashing lights overlaid over it. The headache, which started to develop around the time the visual weirdness shut off (it started and stopped very very suddenly) was pretty mild and didn’t really bother me, although I did (about an hour later) end up taking some ibuprofen for it. If that’s what my migraines are going to be like; I won’t so much mind having them, but hopefully this was a one-off thing.

On the rare occasions I've had migraines (3 since I was 16), they have always started out like that: weird jagged multi-colored scintillating image in my visual field. The fact that they cause a blind spot where the colored image appears is annoying, but the headache that follows has never been that terrible - I've usually been able to just lie down in a dark place to take a nap (doctor recommended this as treatment).

docorion said I should just carry Vitamin I around with me and take some at the first sign of visual weirdness, and that would stave off or at least decrease the severity of the headache. (This particular one wasn’t bad enough that I’d have wanted to lie down somewhere rather than continuing to hang out with my sweetie.)

Vitamin I - good to know; I usually have some on/near me. I can't recall if the last doctor I saw about the migraines recommended any drugs - it's been 9 years since the last one. (but I'd be sad if the pretty flashing lights went away)

I started getting those visual effects (but no headache) occasionally last year when I started taking thyroid hormones. My doctor is confused about why I never get the pain, but actually getting the weird visual effects that get in the way of my vision is pretty disruptive, too.

Interesting! I wonder if my being on thyroid hormone has something to do with this one.

I didn’t find the visual stuff all that disruptive, because it was only in one eye and it wasn’t at the center of my vision. Also, it looked like it was superimposed on real data, rather than replacing it, but it was a little hard to tell. It was all flashing and flickery, though, which was kind of distracting.

Could you say more about HD's labor practices and politics vs. Lowe's? We used to own HD stock way back when, so when we go to a big box, it's the orange one. I hadn't heard anything particularly political about them till now.

Well, they’re major, major Republican donors, beyond the level of “we give money to politicians who happen to be in power because it’s good business”, and even beyond the level of “Republicans tend to be management-friendly and large-business-friendly, so we give money to them.” That’s the political side. For the labour-management side, they work a lot harder than most large companies to prevent their workers from unionizing. I also have the impression they’re a worse place than average to work in terms of benefits, policies, and general treatment, and that’s anecdotally supported by the fact that when I’m in a Home Depot, the employees generally seem stressed and harried and unhappy to be there, and when I’m in the Lowe’s south of here (the only one I’ve spent much time in) the employees seem relaxed, comfortable, and generally happy to help customers.

The Wikipedia articles on Home Depot and Lowe’s (while suffering from the standard Wikipedia quality and reliability problems) are kind of interesting. I found out about Home Depot's Republican leanings at buyblue.org an election cycle ago or so, but they seem to be redoing their site and don’t have that information up at the moment.